A Bit Of Something Else
The Boy Scout is reading to me again. I spoke of it earlier but am loving it so much that I'm bringing it up again. The Brothers K by David James Duncan has been around a long time. It is a beautiful story of a family from each members standpoint. It is loving, poignant and hilariously funny.
As my man was reading yesterday he got to a part that was so touching that I asked him to read it again. The father, who had had a MLB pitching career at one time, but whose thumb has been mangled in a workplace accident, has set up an area in the yard that allows him to try to regain his pitching ability in privacy, or so he thinks. As he struggles to regain what had been, his sons are watching him, one with aching sadness, one with hope. Duncan writes:
But to my mind, hunching in that hedge stands out as the best thing I did that year, and one of the best things I've ever done, period. The dank laurel, the darkness and the need for low-voiced secrecy created an atmosphere that made our talk more considered than the ebullient, hormone-garbled yammering we were prone to elsewhere. And with an eight-piece family crammed in a house the size of ours, it was a balm to discover a place, however squalid, where intimacy with one of my brothers was not a necessity but a choice. But it was that maimed little remnant of what had once been Papa's great art form that has actually stayed with me. There is a part of me that wants to state flat out that I learned more in the hedge about the defiance of dullness and career death, about the glory hidden in defeat, about the amazing inner capacities of a straightforward, no frills man-even a man stripped of hope-than I've learned anywhere since.
Glorious. We are nowhere near done so I cannot give you my final summary, for what it would be worth, but thus far....fantastic. And that comes from someone who has NEVER watched, nor ever intends to watch, a baseball game in her life.
I do listen to baseball on the radio, and have attended many a game in person. it's the only sport I like.
ReplyDeleteAh, your loss. It is like a ballet and well played symphony if done right - and no violence as in football. It's all skill, no hitting anything other than a ball coming at you at 100mph.
ReplyDeleteI think it's nice that you guys read aloud. Romantic dare I say. :-)
A favourite book of mine is Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" and when I saw the title of the book you're reading, I wondered if it was a riff on that novel. And indeed it is, according to the NY Times review of that book back when it was first published:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/28/books/pinch-hitting-for-dostoyevsky.html
It sounds very intriguing -- and funny! So better than Dostoevsky really, who was not known for having much of a sense of humour about life.
This writing is really beautiful. I'm not famliar with the book -- I will be now.
ReplyDeleteWhat a great way to spend time with your man. It sounds like a great book.
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