Exits and Entrances: An Independence Day Pastoral

Travel Stories: Amerikanetz Joel Deutsch joins immigrants from the former Soviet Union for a Fourth of July picnic in Los Angeles

A generous plate of sweet poppyseed rolls appears on the table along with thermoses of coffee and tea. The preferans scores are tallied up, the cards put away. As we are eating our desserts, a young woman trots up in jeans and sneakers. Someone, she says, has sprained an ankle running bases and do we have any ice they could use to hold down the swelling? No, replies one of the men after checking a container where a few forlorn, wet soft drink and beer cans remain. Sorry, no more ice.

Thanks anyway, says the girl brightly, and she jogs away. We finish our sweets and start packing up to leave.

It is late, past sunset. As I stand by the table, watching the softball game continuing in the twilight, one of the women I haven’t spoken to yet comes over and stands beside me.

“Can you explain something, please?” she asks.

“Sure,” I say. “I’ll try, at least.”

“Well,” she says, “can you tell me why people enjoy playing baseball? Or even watching it?” If there is an edge of sarcasm in the question, it is very slight, more defensive than anything. She really wants to know. I wrack my brain for a useful answer.

“I have watched it on TV and I have tried to learn about the rules,” she adds, “but even so, I do not understand why it is popular.”

Seldom is baseball called the National Pastime any more, and when it is, the phrase is enclosed in ironic, invisible quotes and haunted by the truth of just how far basketball and football have driven it down. Regardless, there is something ineradicable about the game, something in the heart, that is increasingly difficult to account for and nonetheless deserving of the attempt.

I would seem an unworthy apologist, considering that when I left my childhood I turned my back on team sports, for reasons of temperament and because I shared a not-uncommon generational distaste for many traditions, even those as benign as this one. But there are moments in middle age, more of them every passing year, when I find myself helpless in the grip of some unbidden nostalgia, ever more aware that we never know for sure how many babies we throw out with the bath water in the attempt, when young, to make the world anew for our willing habitation.

In such a moment, though, and this is one of them, all the resonant and adhesive things about baseball come flooding back to me, proofs and reminders of its power to astonish and console. Larry Doby’s backward-leaping catches against the center field wall of Cleveland Stadium in the hopeless 1954 World Series against the Giants. The rousing swell of the organ music, my own pint-size Indians jacket, the pungent squiggle of brown mustard down the middle of uncountable sweat-beaded hot dogs in their white-bread buns. And a half-remembered, heartbreaking poem about the grace and power of legendary Pittsburgh Pirates right fielder Roberto Clemente that I read somewhere after he died in a plane crash. All this flashes through my mind in milliseconds, and I think I have to say something.

And then I realize that I don’t. That her comment, and all the other puzzled observations I field from this group, are at bottom expressions of grief and anger at the thought of having lost the way back home. Because emigration, however right and necessary, permanently strikes the stage set where identity was forged, a role originated, dries up the sea of first language where one swam without having to give conscious thought to the act of breathing. It is almost as if the precarious Cold War strategies of bluff and standoff had been undone, as in “Dr. Strangelove,” by a single mistake, and Kiev, Riga, Minsk and St. Petersburg have all been wiped out by nuclear warheads, after all.

Finally, the leftovers and implements are gathered up, the trash discarded. Irina and Dima beckon me to come along. “Hang on,” I say, and grab my sweater from the bench where I left it.

The woman is still gazing over at the softball players. As the visuals fade out, the audio track of the game comes forward: the crack of the bat, the scuffling of Nikes and Reeboks on the base-paths, the smack of a hard-thrown ball against the pocket of a leather glove.

“I don’t know,” I tell her, shrugging, moving to leave. “I guess you have to learn it when you’re very young.”

She smiles, in a way that confirms my suspicion that she understood this already, and probably much more, besides. I say do svidaniya, and she says “goodbye,” and I drape the sweater over my shoulders and follow my friends out of the park, wondering how much longer the softball people are going to keep it up in this fading light.

Tags: Global Village, North America, United States, California, Los Angeles

Joel Deutsch is a writer in Los Angeles. His essays have appeared in many publications, including the Los Angeles Times Magazine. His website is JoelDeutsch.net.


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