Editor's Notes

Susan Bono

August 2002

Those of us who attempt to write personal essays would do well to keep in mind the words of Kat Meads, author of the essay collection, Born Southern and Restless. "People aren't interested in your memories," she says. "They're interested in your conflicts."

Readers do tend to be a rather bloodthirsty lot, more entertained by our sorrows than our joys. If we write too enthusiastically about the good in our lives, people start to wonder what we're hiding. No pain, no gain," does not just apply to bodybuilding. Like oysters, we need a bit of grit in order to make our pearls.

On the other hand, everyone is always hoping for a good laugh and a happy ending, which is why I'm sure you'll enjoy these essays. "Looks Good From Here" celebrates the art of savoring life's lemonade, as well as the prospects of making more.

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The Victory Garden Revisited

Donna Schaper

I came back to work after a mastectomy and found a 250-pound man, dressed in Khakis, climbing a small palm tree outside my office door. My office faces a courtyard in our Miami Mediterranean style church. To say the gardens had been neglected in this courtyard is like saying cancer is a minor disease. The man was hanging orchids in the trees outside my office door and placing them precisely at the eye level I might see if I glanced up from my desk. "Richard," I had to say, "What the hell are you doing?" In his British accent, loaned from a youth in South Africa, he said, "I am reminding you to smell the roses."

Richard is an expert horticulturist and imports tropical plants from around the world. He also steals them and smuggles them in. He imagines himself a preservationist of biological diversity. The only genuine trouble he gets in around the church is consistently to overspend the Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter flower budget. He and his son decorate the congregation the night before each of these festivals. We give him an enormous amount of money, and he always spends more and complains about the congregation's stinginess. You should hear what he says about the neglected courtyard gardens, which he put in himself many years ago, using a variety of rare plants, now extinct doubly, both in our courtyard garden and elsewhere.

Still, with all this expensive beauty and important conflict in his life, as well as having a heart appropriately the size of his body, three months ago, Richard tried to take his own life. Then I had stood by his hospital bed and prayed that he would live. He had overdosed on a bizarre variety of pills, fully intending to kill himself. Fortunately, his size outweighed his dose. His wife was leaving him and they couldn't come to an agreement on the antiques and plants that dominated their small house. These imports were "un-split-up-able", a word Richard coined in weak British and is quite perfect. It matches his passion for the near extinct.

My and the prayers of many others were answered, and Richard survived. He was disappointed, but somehow he found a way to give up on the antiques and the plants and the wife and the family. He has started a new house, already a jungle of important biological matter. The judge will still visit the matter of property, and I can't wait for the dialogue. It will be priceless: Richard will try to convince the judge that there is no price to place on a Thai granary table, carved in teak. His equally marvelous wife will come in with her note pad of antique dealer's assessments in bold penciled hand.

Richard is as rare as the plants he harbors, as unique as the antiques of his hearth. He now is bereft without them-and still, in my time of need, he climbed trees and hung dozens of orchids for my delight. Now at least I know he is going to be o.k. Being able to give to another even if our hearts have been broken by love and by a world that neglects rare plants means we have turned the corner towards life. People like Richard can't really be happy, but they can climb trees. Their victories are as large as mine is, for the moment, over cancer.

I only have to take tamoxifen and "self-exam" perpetually. No chemo, no radiation, no more surgery. My congregation has been joining me in temporary rejoicing. Next to Richard's orchids, there appeared two teak lounge chairs, with cushions placed, on my little deck outside my door. One congregant sent ten dozen long stemmed yellow roses to the house! We have long called ourselves the house of four tables, imitating the house of seven gables. Now we will have to rename ourselves the "house of four tables and twenty vases."

In Richard's and my little victory garden, we have added children's chairs and a bowl full of rocks. The custodian wrapped a huge rock, from his home in Kansas in Christmas paper just last week-and it too adorns the deck.

Having cancer is no fun. But having a congregation while having cancer is great. I knew I had returned to something like ordinary life when I saw the peacocks on the side of the road, wild peacocks Richard had warned me to watch for when I first moved to South Florida. Without him, I would not have known to look. After the surgery, I wanted, above all, "my silly back." When I saw Richard in that palm tree, it came. Likewise the victory of the orchids, the large man in the tree. All he was telling me was to remember to smell the roses. As one person put it long ago regarding the gardens of wartime: "The Victory Garden is not just about growing veggies."

Donna Schaper is a writer living in Miami, Florida.

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The View from Here

Ron Franscell

8:35 a.m., June 7, 2002

Mile Marker 62

Wyoming Highway 59

I think I know whose fields these are.

The Wyoming grasslands unfurl in every direction from this spot, like a bolt of velvety fabric spread across the ancient hills. The sunlight is bright this morning, the sky lovely and deep. New lambs play beyond my old friend's fence, while a nervously curious meadowlark watches me watch him.

Funny how after driving precisely 50,000 miles in the past 14 months as the Denver Post's Rocky Mountain Ranger, I would arrive at a familiar place, just down the road from where my children grew up, just over the horizon from where I myself grew up. Some journeys take you farther from where you started, closer to where you come from.

Fifty thousand miles is half a life for most cars, but my Jeep- I call her Flattery, because she gets me everywhere-is only a baby, little more than a year old. If I merely averaged 60 mph, that's almost 21 workweeks of driving through Montana blizzards, Arizona heat, Wyoming wind, Nevada dust, and Utah crickets.

Flattery has traversed more of the American West than Butch Cassidy ever did, traveling the interstate superslab as well as remote mountain corniches, LoDo to the Hole in the Wall. She's crossed the Mississippi on steel bridges, and shallow rivers where bridges were never built. Last June, I got stuck in the Big Horn Mountains while searching for the headwaters of the Little Bighorn River, but Flattery got us out.

Despite our adventures, the pull of a long, straight road is mighty. On them, Flattery's tires hum like a siren song.

She has been my bed, my shelter, my office, my lunch truck, my escape pod, my dance partner, my closest companion on unfamiliar blue highways.

My marriage had fallen apart in the months before I hit the road, so I didn't really lose my wife out here, I just got 50,000 miles farther away. Out here, I wrote innumerable books in my head, and several movies unreeled in my imagination. Out here, I pass too many white crosses beside the road, and too many white buckets-a phenomenon I cannot explain.

Every crossroad offers four ways to go, but only three choices. We can't go back.

The Crow Indians, among whom I've spent much time in the past year, hold sacred the four directions: The North, where the succor of snow originates. The South, where the warm wind is born. The East, where the sun rises to begin a new day. And the West, where the sun sets, freeing our minds to dream.

I choose West.

No matter where I am, West takes me home. If home is not just a house, but the place where I belong, I've spent 14 months not entirely sure where my home is. So any road might lead me there.

But it's not roads I write about, it's the stuff between them and beside them. Writers often spend their whole lives hoping to cross the paths of people whose stories should be told. I have been blessed.

On an abandoned stretch of Route 66 in a far corner of the Arizona desert, I met a woman who lived alone in a big house. She cherished a rusty old Model A Ford. As she told me about the car, her slack-jawed working man stood nearby, protective. He never spoke, but he was clearly not right.

When it was almost time to go, she put her hand on his shoulder and smiled.

"He has the mind of a 5-year-old," she told me, "but he's a good man."

The old car wasn't important to me anymore. Instead, for many miles, I pondered the value of being a good man in a lonely place.

Other people still haunt me, like Jack Kempner of Missoula, who commanded PT 109 in World War II before handing it off to a young whippersnapper named Kennedy who wrecked it. Or Andy Eisenbraun of Wall, S.D., who has spent his whole working life painting the ubiquitous Wall Drug signs. Or the freelance innkeeper and crop-circle buff who shared her calamari with me in a Mendocino, California, tavern.

Or Alice G, the prostitute who carved her name in a doorjamb at Butte's historic Dumas Brothel. I would like to have asked her why she did it. I suspect it might be the only mark she left on this world.

But the world is a big place, and Flattery didn't make every journey. At 37,000 feet over the Atlantic, less than a month after Sept. 11, I was flying to a war zone. I sipped a brandy and spied the constellation Orion out the night window. And I wrote.

"I will die, eventually or sooner, but the places I will go become me and become my memory," I scribbled in the darkened jet. "Children of children who will come from my children should tell the stories, and I hope it makes them better for the telling."

I've heard and told many stories, and learned much in my travels.

I've learned a meadowlark trills at precisely the moment an open car window passes ... a hotel mattress is better on the side away from the phone ... I have an irrational fear of being killed while passing a logging truck ... I can never step in the same river twice ... I cannot stop nor even slow down a sunset.

And I've learned there's no road someone hasn't traveled before me. That's both a comfort and a disappointment.

I must move on now, down this road. I have many more things to learn.

And miles to go.

Ron Franscell, author of The Deadline and Angel Fire, can be contacted at rfranscell@denverpost.com.

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You Know What?

Harry Groome

"Jeff Miller doesn't have any you-know-whats," was the hushed rallying cry of our small class of seventh graders as we finished out the school year. Jeff Miller wasn't his real name, but no matter. None of us really had any you-know-whats either, but no matter, for none of us were having our you-know-whats surgically lowered over the summer the way Jeff Miller was, and that made us feel very superior. At least for a little while. So we whispered and wondered about what would happen that summer, about this mysterious surgical procedure that Jeff was to undergo. How we learned that Jeff was going to have his you-know-whats surgically lowered is still a mystery to me.

But that summer it really did happen. When we arrived back at school that first day of our eighth grade year, all twenty of us were overwhelmed by what we found.

Jeff Miller was a man.

More than a man, an instant he-man. He had grown at least half a foot, had a deep voice and dark beard to go with it, dark and heavy enough to shave every day. But it was a lot more than his voice and beard that made him a man. It was the defined musculature of his body and the black, curly hair that covered it. And in the locker room, Jeff looked like a teacher. His you-know-whats hung down, not at all like ours. Ours looked like small peaches tucked up underneath our other you-know-what that stuck out like the stub of a pink crayon rather than hanging down the way Jeff's did.

Jeff's newfound virility led to the most impressive behavior. Early that fall he showed the entire class how to French kiss a girl by doing exactly that to an eighteen-year-old who had been his baby-sitter until his you-know-whats were surgically lowered and then she had become his something else. You better believe that one act made all of us go home and examine our crayons and peaches pretty carefully.

Of course, Jeff excelled in athletics, simply because he was so much bigger, so much stronger and so much faster than any of us. And with all those muscles and dark hair on his body, he was a scary looking adversary. His crowning achievement came at Blue and Blue Day, the annual field day that pitted the Dark Blues against the Light Blues at the end of each school year. Jeff won all of the events he entered with such ease that it was comical, although no one tried very hard against him because there wasn't any point in it unless you were seriously interested in finishing second.

Traditionally, the last event of Blue and Blue Day was the tug of war, and, in 1951, let the record show that Jeff Miller almost single handedly pulled the Light Blues half way across the field before victory was declared and all of us Dark Blues mobbed our newfound hero. The school also recognized Jeff's stature by awarding him the Silver Medal, the award given to the most outstanding boy in the eighth grade.

The following fall I was packed off to boarding school and lost track of Jeff for the better part of fifteen years-time enough for us both to graduate from high school and college, serve in the military and get married. Then, at a Blue and Blue reunion, a man shorter than me-no taller than five-six-slight of build with a dark beard, receding hair line and wire rim glasses, approached me tentatively and said I might not remember him but his name was Jeff Miller.

We were delighted to see one another and had a lot of catching up to do. I told him I thought he would be at least six feet tall and weigh over two hundred pounds. He told me he thought I would be a scrawny little five-foot, three-inch kid. We both laughed at how different things were now than they once had been, or once had seemed.

But you know what? What I didn't tell Jeff was that I was delighted it was he who had his you-know-whats surgically lowered and not me; that-as uncomfortable and confusing as it was at times-I enjoyed growing up at pretty much the same pace as the rest of my class; that I enjoyed growing into a man's body over a period of years; and that when I finally experienced my first long, passionate kiss well after he showed our class how it was done, I enjoyed it all the more for the waiting.

Harry Groome's stories, poems and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Aethlon, American Writing, Field & Stream, Gray's Sporting Journal and the Red River Review. He is the winner of The 2000 Authors in the Park Short Fiction Contest and has just finished his first novel, Wing Walking.

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The Last Ride of the Season

Laurie Kuntz

A funny thing happened to me when I was six and a half months pregnant.

I gave birth. At the time, I was living in the Philippines and working in a refugee camp. I was one of about fifty Americans hired to supervise a state department funded program to teach English and American Culture to Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian refugees bound for resettlement in America.

The refugee camp was located on the South China Sea in a smudge-on-a-map town called Morong. The town's original name was Moron, but when the English meaning of the word "moron" became known to the locals, a "g" was expeditiously added.

So, my baby was conceived in a town originally known as Moron. Despite its name, it is a lovely, albeit poor place. Beckoning bougainvillea trees bloom amidst coconut palms and bamboo huts. The last paved road spills onto a stretch of black sand beaches. The town has a few sari-sari stores, an exotic name for huts that sell toilet paper, 30-watt light bulbs, matches and kerosene for oil lamps, a necessity during the nightly black-outs when a 30-watt bulb does no one any good. There is no movie theatre, nor restaurant, nor medical clinic in town--which brings me back to giving birth.

I was 34 when I became pregnant. The women of Morong had always treated me with a specific pity reserved for the barren. Once my stomach developed the same bulge and my back had the tired sway of the majority of the town's women, I belonged. I now, in their eyes, had the universal purpose; I was going to have a baby.

Filipinos love children, but they look at pregnancy as an illness. A pregnant woman stays close to home. She never walks. Yens for Pepsi and pork rinds are as unbegrudgingly bestowed as if they were prenatal vitamins. So when my body announced my pregnancy, and I continued to ride my bike the local women enjoyed a swirl of tsimsis; I was the pupil in every gossipmonger's eye.

Of course I refused to give in to the old wives' tales: Stay in the sun, and a baby will be too dark; Drink coffee and a baby will be too bitter; Exercise and harm the child.

Well, I was not a coffee drinker, I always wore sunscreen, and I had always been an avid bike rider.

Passion for biking began in my Brooklyn youth riding down to the junction of Flatbush and Nostrand for an Orange Julius and a Sabret Frank. Years later, I found myself on less crowded streets in Thailand, Brazil and eventually the Philippines.

Morong is every bike rider's challenge, hilly and extremely hot. I felt deserving of the San Miguel Beer advertised on signs rusting off every sari-sari store. There were no old wives' tales about drinking beer, but I knew well enough.

A pregnant bike rider wins no popularity contests. The town's women reproached me and implored that I get off the bike for the well being of my unborn child. They whispered, they frowned, and they sent the Mayor's wife to my house to talk some sense into me.

So, when my water broke in the middle of the night during the latter part of my sixth month, and I had to drive four hours to the nearest hospital these same women had smiles reminiscent of my mother's "I told you so" expression.

According to the doctors, my premature delivery had nothing to do with bike riding. In fact my sport might have saved the life of my child. He was born, all two pounds of him, with a remarkable strength and lung capacity--perhaps the effect of my religious pursuit of exercise and the avoidance of Pepsi and pork rinds.

When my son reached four pounds the doctors allowed me to take him home to Morong. The women quickly forgave me, chalked my foolish ways up to flighty western beliefs of living and eating normally while pregnant.

My son came home at the end of March, the beginning of the monsoon. My bike was put to rest for the season, and I began a different, far more tumultuous ride.

Laurie Kuntz worked in a Vietnamese refugee camp in the Philippines for over a decade. Currently, she is an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland's Asian Campus in Misawa, Japan. She lives in northern Japan with her son and husband and two dogs. Her essay was originally published in Drexel On line Journal: http://www.drexel.edu/doj/

Other sites where Laurie's poetry can be seen are:

The Pittsburgh Quarterly on line http://trfn.clpgh.org/tpq/

Three Candles http://www.threecandles.org,

ForPoetry http://www.ForPoetry.com,

Samsarra Review online http://www.samsaraquarterly.net/

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Pickled

Phoebe Damrosch

A few years ago my mother asked me to help pickle her uterus. As she had imperiously informed the hospital, she had already left an appendix in Manhattan, a placenta in Boston, another in Pittsfield, and the thought of dropping one more body part in a Vermont lab was "simply not an option." After all, she pointed out when she called to enlist my help, it had been my home once.

"Don't you hold any affection for it?" she asked, reminding me that I had indeed enjoyed nine months there ¾ much to her discomfort.

"Not really, no," I responded. She was genuinely surprised.

While another might have leapt at the chance to drive six hours for what amounted to glorified canning, I found the idea bizarre and, quite frankly, nauseating. I began racking my brain for a previous engagement of equal magnitude. Nothing came to me.

"What do you want to do with it, once pickled?" I asked, buying time.

"Plant it."

"Plant it ¾ like in a garden?" I was incredulous, imagining taking the yearly summer tour of the parsley, sweet peas, uterus, zucchini.

Her thought had originally been to keep it in the freezer until the ground thawed and she could bury it, but the hospital lab used formaldehyde to preserve organs for the few days they remained there for study. Although most of the potent stuff would be washed off, the man at the lab warned her against contaminating the freezer, just in case. Still, she was resolved to wait until spring and bury it safely among the perennials.

"The question is how to preserve something if you can't freeze it."

"You could smoke it." I suggested, chuckling at the image of the two of us bumbling around in a faux colonial smokehouse, coughing, waving our arms, surrounded by hanging meat.

She didn't find this at all amusing. "I will not smoke a precious piece of my body as if it were a McKenzie ham."

The surgery was in late February and I took a long weekend to drive up. I had hoped that she might be too groggy afterwards to go ahead with the plan, but I was out of luck.

"Can we swing around to the lab on our way out?" she asked as I packed her into the passenger's seat. The lab technician trailed me to the car with a white plastic tub the size of a large yogurt container. My mother settled it on her lap and winked at him. I remembered why I had moved out of town.

We put off the pickling until the next day, refreshing the ice packs around the tub before we tucked in for the night. But the next morning, we set off again, this time for the liquor store.

"Nothing too extravagant, but nothing tacky either," she explained. I begged her not to ask the counter person for advice.

"Can't we just keep this in the family?" I pleaded.

"Of course we can." She smiled at me and patted my knee, so proud that I understood the significance of this thing we were doing together. And for a moment, I actually did.

"How about Wild Turkey?" I suggested with newborn enthusiasm.

"Nope. A nice, clean gin."

I was wrong. This was nuts.

As promised, my mother kept her mouth shut in the liquor store and we were soon standing at the kitchen counter with a cooler, a large glass jar, and a quart of gin. At this point, we both realized that we hadn't considered the actual pickling process. As in all true culinary emergencies, there was only one source to trust: my grandmother's no-nonsense Joy of Cooking, copyright 1942. It is a seasoned book, spotted with butter stains, chocolate fingerprints, and full of flour. I love how the baking recipes have maple syrup and molasses alternatives for World War II sugar rationing. We took the book from the shelf and pored through the descriptions of pickling.

"'For best results,'" my mother read, "'it is imperative that vegetables and fruit are in prime condition and were harvested no longer than 24 hours in advance.' We just made it," she said, relieved.

The Joy of Cooking suggested all sorts of added ingredients, a variety of vinegar options, and salt solutions, but all of this was meant to ensure crispness and clarity, both of which were irrelevant to our task. After some debate about the importance of a scientific process, we pried off the top of the yogurt container. There it sat, the small, gray, an alien beloved organ and one-time home. With silent precision, we slid it into the jar and sloshed on the booze. My mother secured the lid, screwed on the golden ring, and handed it to me for a final tightening. I gave it my best squeeze and set it down on the counter. We both bent down to get a good look. As I peered into the side of the jar, I saw my mother's face magnified. She smiled at me through the glass, her uterus between us, floating serenely in a Sapphire sea.

Since graduating from Barnard College in 2000, Phoebe Damrosch has worked as a dog walker, role model, writer, busboy, tutor, and nanny; she rode across America on her bicycle, wrote a webpage for a Filipino dating service, and helped to organize a documentary film tour of women's prisons. Phoebe grew up in Haiti and Vermont and currently lives with her viola, Leonard, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

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Manhattan Daze, Hoboken Nights

Kevin Holdsworth

The reason I work on the fortieth floor of the World Trade Center is that the firm that contracts for my indispensable services, Fattwallater, Proffitt and Menefees, had to relocate when Imelda Marcos' ownership interest in the firm's digs at 60 Wall Street became public. Adverse media attention. Jitters among the partners. She owned the building, Signora Marcos. Imelda is receiving a lot of bad press. 6,000 pairs of shoes will do that. A despot husband will do that. Oppression will do that. Bad karma will do that. Journalists just don't understand.

It's a pretty great job. Out of an eight hour shift I work maybe a quarter of the time. Checking out legal briefs. Making sure all the additions and deletions are included. Redlining. Big deals with Salomon Brothers and shipping firms. Words like Holder and Debentures and Estoppel Certificates. Notwithstanding anything contained herein to the contrary. I'm a temp.

The rest of the time I rap with John Brecker and his drug problem and try to make time with one or more of the Italian-American office assistants from Brooklyn-with the perfect makeup and perfect hair and perfect lingerie and brothers who would break my legs if I asked their sistuh out on a date. I persist. There's no great stake in it.

I also write while at work-the perfect job. One of the lawyers wants to option my manuscript, Skilleted Fish, a parody of a spy novel. Also a parody of a parody. Sometimes a parody cubed. He sees big bucks in the movie rights. Things are good on the fortieth floor of the World Trade Center. Tower Two. When it's real windy, the building sways. You feel it most on the perimeter offices-where the partners sit. The drones pretty much keep to the middle. I can talk to the partners, to the office assistants, to the staff, though. I've got a degree.

Maybe the best part is the hours-noon to eight. No real rush hour at either end. Saunter in, saunter out. A view of the harbor. A view uptown from the office of the partner who wants to option my manuscript. He thinks it's really good. He sees dollar signs. Skilleted Fish. My gateway to Gotham glory.

Temping works. Lots of actors and musicians and writers and even models do it. Pays the bills without being vested some place. The hours can be erratic, though, and there's no security, unless you've got a steady gig. This one's been pretty steady: steady enough to save money to get the hell out of this town for a month or two. Go to Wyoming and see some trees or ski for a while. That's the way you do it.

The playoffs. I've got three friends in New York. Joe, who lives on Avenue B, but who has no taste for baseball. Plus, his girlfriend is a pedant. I've been at parties with her New School buddies and they say things such as, "There's no ontology in Marxism." Everyone nods. Like that matters. Ontology-rings around Uranus. Blessed are the New School Marxists. Some of Joe's other friends are okay. They have rooftop parties. Everyone smokes and drinks Bohemian punch and looks out at the cityscape. Everyone plays in a band with a name like The Vacuum Bags or Whetstone or Dachshund. Everyone paints in gouache or does something multi-media. Everyone talks about people like DeKooning.great. and how Rauschenberg is a sellout, Kiefer's a fake, and Frank Stella-just don't talk to me about Frank Stella!

My other two friends live in Hoboken, like me, Moody and Fern. Fern, she's a dancer at NYU. I've been attempting to pursue some of her colleagues. Meanwhile there's Moody, her boy. Together they're two peas in a pod. Together we're three cold cuts on rye. Hoboken's still cheaper than Manhattan. Moody and I play chess. We've also gotten into baseball. The Mets. Viva Los Mets! They have a television, Moody and Fern, but I get off at eight, so I can't barge in. It seems I'm always barging in. Mainly, also, there's the cocaine, the beer and bourbon. Fern's cocaine. Our beer and bourbon. Sometimes I'm the odd one out.

Nevermind. Promptly at eight I stroll across the floodlighted plaza between the soaring pillars of glass and steel. I wander a few blocks north, looking for a sports dive in which to watch the game, the sixth game of the National League Championship Series, a big one, the Mets against the Astros, in Houston-Hewston, not, Howston. I find O'Grady's, a green-signed place with no ferns. I'm nervous.

Enter a room full of strangers. Probably no different for the others, loners all. "Excuse me, is this stool taken?" People keep to themselves, maybe pay more attention than usual-it is the playoffs and the Mets need a win. Win or go golfing or fishing or duck hunting for the winter. Let's sip a Bud. Engage in casual conversation. Everybody's talking to themselves and everyone at the same time. What line-a-work you in? A pitcher's battle. You see that? That dirtbag Mike Scott just scuffed it again! You bet the best games are always low scoring. The strategy and drawing-it-out. Chewing Day's Work, spitting David's sunflower seeds. Defense. Dee-fense. You hear that? They're dissin' Daryl! Regulation ends in a tie. People are paying much more attention. Scuff-er, scuff-er. Tension begins to ratchet us. The game gears into extra innings.

There ensues a delightful seesaw, played at a pace only baseball provides, tortoise slow and fast as Doc Gooden's heater. You talk strategy. You talk what-if's. The Mets score. You happy. The Astros answer. You fret.

Everyone in O'Grady's is intent on the game. Conversation lapses and lags. No one scores. Pitch after pitch sails to Papa. The game is played inside a domed stadium. In Houston. In the bottom half of each inning we hang on every pitch, every pop-up, every grounder, each manager's sign, every runner.

The tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth innings pass. Wound tight, resolved into a cohesive burl, we wonder about our own endurance. What time is it? How long this been going on? But there is no question of leaving. The boys need us, down there in Houston. Need us! You ever been to Texas? Time vanishes.

It doesn't matter that the woman next to me is a Reebok-wearing Republican in a khaki trenchcoat, or that the man two stools over floats junk bonds, or that the fellow over there has done time in Sing Sing for white-collar crime. We are joined. Refugees from Corporate Yosemite, cheering on our team. Our team! Come on, come on! Viva Los Mets!

The Mets score in the top of the fourteenth and pandemonium sweeps through the bar.

"Awesome!"

"Hey buddy-you see that? What I tell you?"

"AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWRightA!"

"I knew it. I knew it. I knew they could do it."

"Mookie. Mookie. Mookie."

"Hey now, hey now!"

The Astros threaten but cannot bring a runner across home plate in the home-side bottom of the inning. The Mets hold the lead. Strike three brings something beyond pandemonium-wild chaos-shouting, dancing, hugging, high fives, and back-slapping hard enough to loosen dentures and free fillings. We're all in this together! We close! My throat feels raw and stripped from the fierce shouting. I feel light and invulnerable from the two hours of concentrated yet drawn-out magic found only in watching sports.

After the waves of glee pass, after fifteen minutes, we begin to file out of O'Grady's. What the hell, I leave a fat tip on the counter, say "See you around," to my new-found never-to-be-seen again friends, pull on my Florentine leather jacket, and step out into the night. The ocean breeze blows cold and biting through the downtown canyons. I saunter south, woozy with it, and pause to salute as I cross the plaza between the Twin Towers. They seem unreal, tall as players, majestic in the floodlights-center and right-my too-tall friends.

Passing into the underworld, I don't even begrudge the rat mezzanines beneath the surface, the cheesy shops shuttered now, the too-low ceiling, the acres of turd-brown tile, the horrid lighting. I make my way to the PATH train, and the mood is merry. It seems everyone has been watching the game. We orange. We white and we blue. Even Yankees fans feel it and manage a wincing smile. This might be the year. We clatter through the tunnel and plunge under the river.

Disgorged in Hoboken, I look east to see that the Empire State is lit in celebration. Sunset colors. Sunset and dawn, orange and blue. I stroll the streets of Hoboken. Past the Gagliardis and Sorrentinis, their furniture swathed in plastic, the St. Francis birdbath in the front yards. Across the church square where night pigeons roost in the Romanesque bell tower. Past the library that houses a shrine to a blue-eyed crooning native son, Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars. Past garages. Past tenements being converted to yuppie pens. Past empty lots strewn with broken bottles, vegetable crates, dirty magazines, small rodents, carnations of newspapers, and swamp grass. Past clots of kids that gather and loiter and shout hey, man, and toss their sneakers into the air to hang on power lines and dangle.

The air smells a little less fetid, a little fresher. I make a vow on Frankie's very street, Monroe St.-Mr. Francis Albert Sinatra, if you please-to do it my way, no matter what. And as I step into my cold water storefront flat-once a filling station (Gulf), once an Italian social club, Hey, you seen Joey Petrosino?-now an erstwhile art gallery, Gallery Petrolio, home of Simon Ryman, un grande artiste-it hits me that this city, this world, this life, is nowhere near as cold and heartless as they say. It's my world now too. It's all of us and everything.

Postscript:

The Mets went on to win the World Series in '86-they haven't done as well since-and in the process Boston's Bill Buckner, by virtue of a life-haunting screw-up, became the Uber-Goat, a household name. Skilleted Fish went nowhere and now gathers dust and hantavirus someplace far away from New Jersey. Gallery Petrolio is rather unceremoniously celebrated as a converted gas station in Rick Moody's The Black Veil, pp. 192-210. The World Trade Center was destroyed on 9-11-01. The South Tower, the second one hit, collapsed 56 minutes after being struck, on floors 78-86, by a hijacked Boeing 767.

Kevin Holdsworth lives, writes and teaches in Green River, Wyoming. This is his second appearance in Tiny Lights.

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