Grounding Out

The day was an early one or an early one for me at least. I met a friend of mine outside a building I used to live in and he drove us to a friend of his where we were going to work. It was 11:30 and it was hot, probably just below 90 when we got there. Our task was to move and reassemble 13 filing cabinets from a garage to an office building. It was soupy humid and the sun promised more heat in the afternoon. I was sweating before we loaded a single cabinet. I wouldn’t be dry until I rubbed my tennis ball green towel over my body at 7 that night.

The work itself wasn’t too bad. Manual labor isn’t too bad in general, I think. The only time I’ve felt God was in manual labor. I didn’t see God on this day. It was the hottest day of the summer. When my friend dropped me off in front of the building I now live in I had 100 dollars in my previously lonesome wallet, a soaked through t-shirt, tired arms and back, and that sense of accomplishment that you can only get after working on days like this. I also had a ticket to see the Cardinals that night. I had planned on going back to Ohio instead of the baseball game.

I wanted to be home for father’s day and to be with my mom. She had just gotten back from a trip to see her dying father. My grandfather, the man I’m named after. I needed to be home. But not tonight. I wouldn’t get back there until 2 or 3 in the morning and I was utterly worn out. Baseball would be my treat. Baseball would be my cure. Dying grandfathers, grieving mothers, father’s day obligations, joblessness, homelessness, and an unshakable feeling of being out of place- they would all wait for tomorrow. Baseball tonight.

We got there late. The Tigers hung 4 on the birds in the first inning that we missed. We were delayed at the bar before hand waiting on the fourth person of our party to turn up. Eventually she showed up and she, my roommate, his cousin, I went downtown to the ballpark. She was a cute student from a neighboring state school. We each had a beer that cut through the heat of what was becoming the hottest night of the year, laid a foundation of small talk, and then I turned it on.

It didn’t really matter that there wasn’t any real future for us past the end of the game. I wasn’t interested in hooking up with her, or dating her, or even seeing her the next time she came out. She was a pretty face sitting next to me at a baseball game and that was all I really needed her to be.

I would tell a story and she would smile. I would make a joke and she would laugh. I would pull on my beer and grin as it coolly snaked through my body. The Cards cut into the Detroit lead. The sun set, I ate a bratwurst and watched how her cheeks pulled up her lips to put her teeth on display.

Two home runs in the Detroit half of the eighth and the ball park thermometer reading in the high eighties prompted my roommate and his cousin to pitch the idea of leaving. It wasn’t so much that I thought the Cardinals were going to come back, or that I wanted more time to seal the deal with her, or any other specific reason, I just didn’t want to go. I convinced them to stay.

Two scoreless half innings later I turned to her in the bottom of the ninth, “If this guy reaches base, we’re winning this game.” I grinned and raised my eyebrows at her after ball four. She smiled and shrugged her shoulders. The aura of the bottom of the ninth stirred deep inside of me and for the first time in a long, long time I was happy. More than being happy, I was excited. Something was happening, there were signs of life here in the bottom of the ninth and in her pretty face and in me.

It was 6-3 with a runner on first base when Albert Pujols, the best baseball player on the planet, a man who I had earlier described to her twinkling eyes as “better at his job than I ever will be at any job I ever do,” flied out to left field. But whatever air left the stadium when the left fielder squeezed Pujols’ fly ball not only came back but multiplied after a wild pitch and two walks loaded the bases for Rick Ankiel.

I’ve been a Rick Ankiel fan for as long as he’s been in the majors. He came up as a pitcher with a ton of promise. When he got called up to the show I already had four or five of his rookie cards and had been personally hyping his arrival for a year. Then Rick Ankiel had one of the biggest meltdowns of anyone I’ve ever heard of. He couldn’t find the plate with both hands, a map, and a compass and would routinely fire balls at the backstop. He lost all sense of command. It got so bad that he couldn’t play catch. Throwing the ball to a target was now the hardest thing in the world to someone who was on the verge of making millions for doing just that. Somewhere between his ears pitching stopped making sense and he was sent down. A few years ago he resurfaced with the Cardinals, not as a pitcher but an outfielder with a canon for an arm and a bat that had decent pop in it. My favorite player came back and hit a homerun in his debut.

And so my hero dug in with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. I was on my feet encouraging him, occasionally throwing my head over my shoulder to smile at her and let her chide me for being so into the moment. At least half of the 41,000 and change that were on hand for the beginning of the game had left but the rest of us were standing. Ankiel took strike one and then looked at a ball. On the third pitch he put his bat on the ball. He took a change-up and hit it to Detroit’s shortstop who stepped on second and then threw out Ankiel at first.

After we dropped her off at her car I told her it was lovely to meet her. I tried to rally support for night swimming until I was informed that there was no was to access any of the three pools around us. I was dropped off at my building, my back and arms more sore now than they were hours ago. It was still hot outside. It was going to be hot in my apartment. I wouldn’t need a blanket to cover me when I went to sleep on the same couch I had been on for the last month. The next morning I was to drive for six hours to see my family. To celebrate father’s day. To be there for my mom. To explain my troubles in landing work. To keep being oddly unhappy and strangely stuck. To lie awake in my bed at night and think about Rick Ankiel grounding into a double play.

A Summer of Discontent

“Are you happy with who you are, right now?”

This is what I asked of my friend, anticipating the question to be reciprocated to me. I heard his answer. I heard his reasons why he was. I knew what my answer was, and I knew that it was true.

No.

The cliché is that you go abroad for a while, find yourself and come back a changed person. What no one ever warns you about is that when you come home, yes, you are some changed version of yourself, but you don’t know how to make sense of it. That’s where I am. A series of mild epiphanies and small truths abroad has culminated with an unnerving fact: I know I’m no longer who I once was, and I’m not sure who it is I’m looking at in the mirror any more.

When I left everything in my life was tangible and punctuated by the very present knowledge that my life- the people I loved and the person I was- had already been established. I loved my school. I loved my friends. I loved my now ex-girlfriend. I was going to go to Spain, have a semester of fun and discovery. I would come back with some stories to tell but everything would still be here waiting for me. I’m here now. My school is here now. My friends are here now. My ex is here now (to some degree), but the man that got on that plane 5 months ago isn’t here now. I was going to come back and graduate. She and I were going to work through the distance for a semester, she would graduate and move here to be with me until I graduated, and my life would grow from there. Instead I’m stumbling through a haze of questions and the only certain answer that I can come up with is that I’m not friendly with any aspect of who I am or what I’m doing.

I saw my life through a microscope. My future was present enough for me to rearrange it with a flick of a wrist or a twist of my fingers. She was the one. They were my best men. My life was at hand and it was just a matter of time before I put everything into place.

The things that were close to me then are now seen through a telescope that I’m looking through backwards. All the staples that were immovable and convenient are now so far away that I can only recognize them, no less manipulate them at my whims. Even worse than being apart from the things I once cared about and loved is the fact that I am inescapably aware of the distance. I’m freefalling and am completely sentient of it happening with resounding fear that I forgot my parachute. No cigarette, or drink, or joint, or night of laughter can rescue me from the fact that I know that I’m at the epicenter of my own confusion. The certainty of my being lost is rivaled only by my own awareness of being lost.

I’ve seen sunrises and the bottom of bottles, talked to my sages and reflected again and again. My only conclusion is this is just something I’m going to have to deal with. The answers aren’t out there, no matter how much I want someone to drop a road map on me. I wanted to come home, I wanted to reconnect. I wanted my life back. Trouble is, my roots are foreign. I cannot find my own feet in a world of obscure familiarity.

The issue isn’t that I don’t feel at home here, rather that I don’t feel at home anywhere. I know for certain that if I went back to Spain I wouldn’t be happier than I would be here or back in Colorado, or California, or any other place you can throw a dart at. I can’t blame her or them or America for not being what I want them to be. I can’t figure out what I want any of them to be. I want to be home again but I don’t know where to start looking for it. I want to stand firmly on something I can believe in. Goals like graduating and seeing my friends and being in love are as comforting as an addressed envelope without a letter inside.

I’m standing at the apex of loneliness and confusion but I can’t decide where to aim my first steps away from it. The best I can do is keep getting up in the morning and filling the hours until something rings true to me again. I’ve always struggled with the question “where are you from?” but this is the first time that I’ve ever felt homeless. I once couldn’t wait for my future to start. If I could have hit a fast forward button to get me to my marriage with her and the life I had so precisely planned I would have. I’m still looking for fast forward, just to get me out of being stuck. Truth is, the best I can do for now is just get out of bed. And that’s not much of a consolation.