The Pathbeater

With the coming of the warmer weather, I have been thinking about how much I miss Steve Garvey. Since I’ve never actually met the real Steve Garvey (who was a first baseman for the Dodgers), that sentence might not make any sense, so allow me to explain.

When I was growing up, my brothers and I used to play a game in our back yard called Home Run Derby. Essentially, it was a game of Wiffle Ball, but with no base running and no fielding to speak of, just pitching and hitting. Hit a ball off the porch for a single, off the siding was a double, the gutter and windows were triples, and a blast onto the roof was a home run. If you swung the bat and the result was anything other than the ball landing on some part of the house on the fly, you were out.

My father was not the biggest fan of Home Run Derby. With Wiffle Balls constantly bouncing off of his house, he was convinced that we were going to break something, or ruin the roof. Also, there was the time a line drive struck my grandmother, who was sitting innocently on the deck during a party. It was nothing more serious than a bit of a startle and a spilled beverage. My grandmother was a good sport about it, but seeing his mother get plunked didn’t raise my father’s opinion of the game any. There were other incidents, as well (like the time he got hit by a ball that had flown through an open bathroom window) but in general, since nothing ever broke and it kept us from destroying the inside of his house, Dad mostly tolerated the Derby.

That was good, because we played a ton of it.

Each of my brothers had a specialty pitch, crafted for years before I showed up – my brother Mike had a rising fast ball (thrown at about 100mph) that would have you ducking out of the way as it swept through the strike zone. My brother Jim had “The Floater,” which would come dancing up to the strike zone, pause briefly, and then pull your pants down. My brother Bill had a variation of The Floater he called “The Blooper,” but in my memory The Blooper spent most of its time flying up onto the roof (Bill will likely not be pleased about this recollection). Me, I just threw as hard as I could and hoped for the best.

My best, playing against people at least 9 years older with their fancy pitches, was often not good enough. I lost and lost, but I loved to play so much that I would just keep on plugging. I remember one game in particular where my brother Jim and I were pretending to be major leaguers – I was the Red Sox and Jim was the Dodgers. I was actually leading, 3-2, in the 9th inning and I was desperate to win.

That desperation is a funny thing. My brothers were not people who would lay down for anyone, not even their little brother. I had to earn it. That might have been discouraging for some people, but it drove my competitive fire. I wanted to get better and better and keep playing until I could dominate and pay them back for all the years of losing – even at a game like backyard Wiffle Ball.

So, on this particular day, the sun was shining and it was hot, probably July or August. I was standing in my backyard with sweat rolling down my back and into my shorts. I was pretending to be Dennis Eckersley, with his high leg kick, and I was going for a complete game victory.

There were two outs when my brother announced that Bill Russell (the old Dodger shortstop), was batting. I reared back and threw a medium ball on the outside corner and Russell (who, after a long career of being right-handed, was suddenly batting in my brother’s lefty style) flicked it off the siding of the house for a double. The tying run was on base. This was before the World Series collapse in 1986, but I had already been trained to expect bad things for the Sox, even the Wiffle Sox, in the 9th inning.

I tried to reason with myself as Jim announced that Steve Garvey was batting. One out to go and anything – a foul tip, a ground ball, or even a swing and a miss – would mean victory. Sweet, precious victory could be mine. I smiled greedily at the thought of it. I took a deep breath as Jim waved at me with a couple of practice swings. His face was all concentration.

I kicked and threw as hard as I knew how. The tendons in my shoulder strained from the effort, and there was a soft grinding sound in my elbow. The ball tumbled over itself as it whistled unevenly toward my brother. The long plastic bat cut through the air, and in the next instant the ball was bouncing down the shingles of my father’s roof. Home run. Steve Garvey. Ballgame.

My brother wasn’t one to gloat. He patted me on the back, then shook my hand and said, “Good game.” As we walked back into the house, I snuck a look back at him, and noticed him smiling to himself. It was a wide, contagious smile, and it was clear that it came from a place of joy and was not at my expense.

I saw the smile again this past November. Jim was bed-ridden from the cancer that would soon take him from me, and he was quiet, as he often was then. I was sitting on his bed, trying to think of something to say. I looked at him, held his gaze for a moment, smiled, and said, “Damn that Steve Garvey.” He chuckled, and for just a split second we were in the backyard with only Wiffle Balls to worry about.

I was on my living room couch, trying to watch the Olympics, but in truth I was falling in and out of sleep. At one point I woke with a start and saw movement in my front hall. I straightened up and blinked the sleep out of my eyes, which allowed me to focus on the mouse slowly making its way toward my kitchen.

Shocked, I decided to make the varmint pay for his trespass. I turned to my trusty dog and said, “Callie, go get ‘em!” My dog - who vigorously defends my property against skunks, possums, and delivery trucks - blinked twice, and rolled over as if to say, “Rub my belly?” Man’s best friend, indeed.

I can’t rule out the possibility that Callie has reached some sort of non-aggression pact with the local rodent population. Anyone who has watched classic Looney Tunes knows that there is a real danger for local house pets that resist the local vermin population (Sylvester the Cat, for one, got abducted and almost ritually slaughtered). Another possibility is that my dog is just getting a bit older and more relaxed about sharing the local resources of food and shelter. Or maybe she’s just going deaf and losing her sense of smell. Or maybe dogs as a species don’t care as much about mice as they do about mailmen.

Whatever the reason for my dog’s sudden largesse, I cannot be so generous about sharing my abode with members of the long-tailed twitchy nose society. The next morning I purchased a large variety of snap traps. I decided against the idea of poison – because having mice die and rot in my walls creeps me out – and against glue traps, because I have this mental image of my dog trotting around with a trap glued to her nose. I set the traps in strategic locations around the house and hoped to duplicate my somewhat famous collegiate success with eliminating household pests.

I was living in a fraternity house at the time. There were rumors among the residents that a large rat had been sighted, and that various snacks had been nibbled. The thought of rats made sense because, after all, we lived in a fraternity house and it was disgusting (as opposed to now, when our house is pretty darned clean. I may drop a Cheerio under the couch once in a while, but still). I didn’t really take the rat reports very seriously – none of my snacks had been nibbled - until one evening when I returned to the house after class.

There, standing in the kitchen, was the biggest rat I have ever seen. It was at least a foot long, with a tail at least as long as that, and probably half a foot longer. My fight or flight instincts were ignored as my brain hit the reset button, and I just stood there, frozen. The beast looked up at me and then, out of what I suspect was courtesy more than fear, slowly turned and ambled his bulk into the pantry and disappeared under the cabinets. I looked under the cabinets, expecting to see some cavernous hole torn in the woodwork, but there was nothing. Rats, even ones large enough to be saddled, are trained contortionists.

I then marched to the local hardware store, where I bought the biggest rat trap I could find. I only bought one, because I was a poor college student who wasn’t going to blow his semester party budget on traps, and because I had only seen one rat. I smeared the trap with peanut butter, hefted the crash bar back (no small feat) and placed the trap in the pantry. I didn’t tuck it in a corner; instead I just left it in the middle of the floor (which in retrospect was quite a danger to the toes of anyone who might have sleepily shuffled into the room for a late night snack).

Later that evening, or to be more accurate very early the next morning, I was furiously typing a paper (funny how some things haven’t changed) when I heard a loud SNAP. I ran to the pantry and saw that Kong had been defeated. I allowed a moment of silence in deference to the passing of such an impressive creature, and then tracked down a shovel and hefted him into the trash can outside. For the next day or so, a steady steam of sightseers came to our house to view the dispatched giant.

We didn’t have any rodent problems after that. Perhaps the local population of clear-thinking rats wanted to avoid the filth of that fraternity house, but it is more likely that the rat I killed had already eaten all of his competition.

I am hopeful that my experience as a big game hunter in Lowell will translate to success hunting much smaller game in Clinton. My wife, who gets queasy at the idea of killing anything, especially something as cute as a small mouse, made a brief argument for joining the dog in the spirit of détente, but I held firm. Since my wife has, in the past, snapped her finger in a mouse trap (“I couldn’t help it, I just felt drawn to it,” she explained), it goes without saying that everything mouse-related is my responsibility. Now I just have to find some way of dressing the mice up as tiny postmen.

I could see my breath the other morning as I shoveled the latest batch of Mother Nature’s bounty off of my driveway. The snow wasn’t heavy, and I used short, measured strokes as I wondered why I haven’t yet moved to San Diego. I was scraping snow off of the roof of my car when I heard a rickety pickup truck shamble down the street and stop at the end of my driveway. An emergency brake was cranked, and the door of the pickup opened and then slammed shut while the engine idled. I looked up and there before me, in an old coat and boots, was my old friend Rick O’Shea.

He looked at me, and the shovel stuck in the snow bank next to me, and asked, “Don’t you have a snow blower?”

I do, I answered, but the snow isn’t heavy and I need the exercise.

“Exercise is for people without cable TV. Speaking of which, have you been watching the Olympics?”

Yeah, I have, a bit. I watched ski jumping the other day and was surprised to find out that there are style points involved. So, in theory, you could jump more distance than the next guy, but because he looked better doing it he could win. Wow, that guy only jumped 10 meters, but he is super hot, so he gets the gold. It’s kind of like the BCS in college football; win all of your games and hope they vote for you.

“That is a bit weird. You know, with all of the judging, I’m surprised that the Olympics don’t get better ratings. I mean, it’s not that different from American Idol.”

How is that?

“In both cases you have these people nobody has ever heard of before trying to compete on a major stage. In American Idol they are singing, but the back stories they give you for the contestants is pretty similar to the stories they do on the Olympic athletes. You watch a little bit about the person’s history, and then you watch them compete. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they blow it. It’s compelling.”

Maybe the Olympic judges should wear white t-shirts and make snarky comments to the athletes: I’m just not feeling that triple toe loop, dog.

“If the judges had any kind of showmanship, I’m telling you, huge ratings. Maybe they could get Paula; I think she’s free. I could see the Scott Hamilton guy as a shorter Simon Cowell.”

I suppose suggesting something like that would make the stodgy old Olympic officials’ heads explode. As long as we’re going there, though, why not let the ski jumpers on the ground throw one snowball at their airborne opponents. Being able to take an iceball in the chops and still pull off a Telemark landing would really deserve style points.

Maybe they could create a shoveling competition. You could enter, since you seem to enjoy it so much. If you use the snow blower, you can get right back inside and finish painting the baby’s room.”

Gee, thanks for the tip. I’m getting a jump on the father’s ability to escape, I mean, do outdoor chores instead of indoor chores.

“Don’t you like painting? I remember when I was in high school I used to paint all kinds of stuff – water towers, bridges, rocks, my little brother…”

Painting isn’t that bad, except I can’t do anything that requires actual skill. I end up slopping paint all over everything. What I don’t like is spackling. The other day I was trying to sand some spackle and at the end I was covered head to toe with plaster – I looked like a mummy. Did you know that spackle sticks to contact lenses? And the taste - well, it was no kindergarten paste, but it wasn’t half bad.

“Ah, paste, I remember it well. There was one vintage I liked the best; I think it was Elmer’s 1976. Not too dry, and didn’t stick to the roof of your mouth.”

Yes, ’76 was a good year.

“Nice talking to you, but I should probably hit the road. My wife thinks I’m out buying salt for the steps, but I think I’ll swing by the coffee shop so I can read the paper in peace…don’t look at me like that. Just wait, you’ll be looking to eke out a half hour for yourself here and there once you have a baby in the house. Oh, and tell The Megger that Richard is a nice name for a boy. Ricky McCaffrey had a nice ring to it.”

It’s the other nickname I’d be worried about, but thanks for the idea.

But by the time I said it, Rick was already swinging into the cab of his truck. There was a thump as the emergency brake was released, and the pickup shambled down the road toward Rick’s half hour of freedom.