"I felt what I almost always feel when I am watching a ballgame: Just for those two or three hours, there is really no place I would rather be."
-Roger Angell
This may be the last day of this Bataan Death March of a work week in Panama City. I have a hearing in a few minutes by Zoom, then a deposition at ten, then if all goes according to plan I'll dash to Perry, jump in the leaky Columbia and sputter north to KELM, landing just before the tower closes for the night.
I'll work hard up there as well, attending a mediation first thing Friday and slogging through my first week of tax school homework over the weekend. But it's different: Peg and I are together, I'm in a leafy, verdant, uncrowded environment, and it just feels like the very best of small town America.
I'm also looking forward to the distraction of sports. We are entering the very best time of the year for a fan of America's two favorite games, as the MLB pennant races enter the stretch and football arrives with the first changing of the leaves on the hillsides around Corning.
Who couldn't be excited about what's going on with the Braves all of a sudden?
Last night while P and I talked on the phone, they completed a sweep of a very good Minnesota Twins squad, in Minneapolis. As I sit here they hold the third and final wild card slot, and have pulled within five games of the best Phillies team I've seen since I was in elementary school. Some of the walking wounded are back from injured reserve; the mid-level relievers have finally shown some consistency.
When I sit on the porch in Corning with my friends on the radio--the Braves broadcast team--or they're on the television at 407 while I unwind after a very long workday, the world just feels a little better. There's continuity going all the way back to sitting on the back porch in Marietta with my dad when I was seven, eating roasted peanuts out of the shell and rooting for Hank Aaron and Knucksy Phil Niekro.
And on Saturday college football arrives. The noon game features my beloved Georgia Bulldogs taking on the Clemson Tigers.
This is a a very old rivalry that sort of fell by the wayside years ago because the Dawgs are in the SEC and Clemson plays in the ACC. The two schools aren't a hundred miles apart, and back when I was a kid these games were pretty intense. Whenever Georgia starts playing ball I can almost feel the ghost of Lewis Grizzard sitting next to me swilling a cold one and recalling the great and not-so-great Georgia teams of the past, can hear my beloved Uncle Lehman, now gone these three years, laughing with the game in the background and telling stories of "yo daddy" and what a wild man Dean was in his day. It's a portal to what wasn't a better time, but was certainly a sweet time.
But wait! There's more! With the NFL season still a week away, Sunday features my alma mater, the USC Trojans, battling LSU in Las Vegas as the prime time game.
It's anyone's guess whether the Men of Troy will be worth a damn this year. They have a new defensive coordinator, bringing hope of shoring up a porous defensive line, but they also lost their Heisman Trophy winning quarterback to the NFL. Wishing as I write this I could park in the den with the world's biggest USC fan, my grandfather, and sip a Modelo while bemoaning what the transfer portal and NIL money have done to the game.
I have trouble describing how much I'm looking forward to all of this, during a crushing season of work and depressing political news, and pity anyone who doesn't have this escape hatch into a better place. The rituals of smoking a massive pile of meat, feasting on Peg's amazing guacamole that isn't really guacamole because she dolls it up into something extraordinary, being forced just to abide for three hours while the drama of the big game plays out in real time--it's meaningless and part of what makes life worth living, all at the same time. A paradox.
Time to pull on a bowtie and go talk to the judge.
Scalp 'Em Braves. Sic 'Em Dawgs. Fight On.
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