HANG TIME

I was telling somebody (Robin) just the other day, sometimes you get this focused moment that files away an indelible memory you can readily summon up anywhere anytime. Maybe it’s a jock thing, maybe it’s a guy thing, but I don’ think it’s exclusively that. At any rate, the memory serves to explain and to comfort those of us who’ve been experiencing this vague sea-change, cast-adrift kind of emotional hole we had been nibbling around the edges of. That depression, out-of-sorts thing you might be feeling these days.

Picture yourself on the baseball team, any team. Maybe you were the last kid chosen in a heartbreaker, or maybe you were so confident that you just walked out and took your position on the field, knowing the captain would see it as fine and dandy.

You’re just standing there, maybe it’s even as the lowliest of the low “roving fielder” position they send the inept kids to. But here comes that moment—the sharp smack of the ball and bat as your opponent tags a high hard one and it lofts into the air. S/he’s already tossed the bat down the first base line and is running like hell to squeeze out a triple off the fly ball, which has a good chance of going out into the parking lot. But you look up, calculate the trajectory of the ball, take two steps to the left, and voila you know you are right under it.

Your glove is oiled and flexes just right, the sun is over your shoulder, illuminating the ball so you can see it perfectly up there high in the air, and you know you are gonna catch the fly ball, NO QUESTION. Everything is prepared, everything is just right. You are the right person in the right place at the right time. All that remains before you feel that totally satisfying ‘pop’ in your glove is for the three or four or five seconds the ball is in the air to elapse. It’s called ‘hang time’. If it was football, it would be the time while you were standing at the 5 yard line waiting for the kicked-off ball to settle down into your arms.

That’s the core of the memory, that 3, 4, or 5 seconds. What do you do? You stand there, maybe pound your glove a time or two in anticipation. But you have all this time to think. Everything is already set in motion, there is nothing else required but waiting ... and thinking is irrelevant. But you think anyway—nothing else to do, -- you got all this hang time as the ball arcs and then starts to drop.

Maybe the game seems desperate and the outcome too bleak to contemplate. You could have negative thoughts: “What if I miss the ball? What if I drop it? What if that cute blond with the ponytail doesn’t see me catch it? What if the exact split second the ball hits my glove a turtle falls out of the sky and deflects the ball? What if it hurts my hand? What’s for dinner? What if I don’t know what base to throw it to, after I catch it? What if ....”

Maybe you’re having a moment of sanity and the game is just a game. You could have positive thoughts: “The ball is gonna look so cool sailing straight into my glove. I’m gonna win the game! The cute blond is gonna ask me to go for pizza! I will even catch the turtle too! It will feel GOOD in my glove, my hand will feel heroic! I can make the throw to third base easy to get the other runner! Wewon wewon we won!!!”

You could think about anything. If it were any longer than three, four, five seconds, you could go CRAZY with all the things you could think about.

And that’s what’s going on here with us. The mess Bush has made, the elections, the war, the world, global warming, school inoculations, the low battery on the pickup, that unfortunate rip in the last condom, the price of energy ... all of it floods in to fill up our thoughts while we wait with our glove for history to get over its maddening hang time and get on with happening.

Whattabout Global Warming, whatabout the war, whaa the fuck happened to the democrats’ spine fer chrissakes,????? It just seems to be getting weirder and weirder and weirder!!!

.... and so we fill up this hang time with sea changes: I will be so damned introspective, I hate the way my tummy bulges, she might be pregnant, I gotta change, I gotta stop being the way I am, I gotta quit spending all my time writing meaningless posts to the blog, I gotta quit proving to the world just how crazy I am, I gotta start working out, I can’t stand this waiting, I’m gonna kill something, I gotta take a trip to mars, I have to change my life, I have to make my family change, I needa new car, I need more pizza ..... hang time hang time hang time hang time. It is driving us CRAZY, goddammit!!!!!!!!!!!

But
wait for it ...

wait a bit more ... (focus on standing just right for the setup to throw the about-to-be-caught ball, to fix the truck battery, to exercise that tummy fat away, to be ready for the news when it comes) ...

it’s all because catching the ball seems to be the most important thing in the world and there’s nothing you can do until November 2008 and until the ball comes down out of that long arc.

You hear the crowd in the bleachers starting to yell, you hear the beginnings of the cheers ....

... and twenty years from now you won’t be able to remember a damned thing about what you were thinking during that awful hang time, you will just remember that waiting and the fact that you totally reorganized your life in those 3, four, or 5 seconds. You won’t remember whether your friend told you she was pregnant or had her period, you won’t remember anything but the core of that memory.

And exactly the way that ball felt when it smacked into the pocket of your glove, the way you spun and pegged a perfect throw to third base, the way the blond looked at you, the way the runner who got tagged out looked at you, and most especially the way the batter who hit the ball stood there in the base path looked at you, mouth agape, amazed that you caught it.

There’s a lot of hang time left. Remember to breathe, don’t hold your breath, remember to enjoy the pizza, remember to think about how wonderful that sex was; don’t be in a hurry, enjoy life. All ya have to do is vote, the hardest decision will be whether the scent of that freshly oiled glove, or the magic scent of the nape of her neck is the greatest smell you ever smelled.

Soon enough, this particular fly ball will all be in your glove ... a memory.

It’s just Hang Time.