Tag / Brian Holbrook

by Brian E. Holbrook

Something Like a War

It was forty years ago, this year, that I fell in love with baseball: October 1982 and I was nine years old. My team, the St. Louis Cardinals, were in the hunt for the World Series title, facing off against the Milwaukee Brewers. We we considered the underdogs, and I was glued to the TV nearly-nightly during that magical fall, determined to do my bit as a fan to make sure we won. The whole region was crazy with Cardinal Fever that Autumn and it made everything feel electrified and cheerful, almost like a second Christmas.

Baseball fandom was nearly mandatory where I grew up. From the first pitch of Spring Training to the last (usually) heartbreaking out of the season, nearly everyone was following the Cardinals game. It was almost impossible to ignore. From TV’s and car stereos, shop radios to store PA systems, repair shops, gas stations, car dealerships, pawn shops, music stores, everyone had the game playing in some form or fashion.

The Christmas before, my Aunt Shirley (aware of my budding baseball interest) had given me a pendant she’d purchased from Avon: a small, pewter baseball-mitt with a golden baseball in its center, hanging on a silver chain.

Early in the season, I had taken to wearing the pendant while watching the games on TV or listening to them on the radio. During crucial plays, I’d rub the baseball in the center of the mitt with feverish thumbs, closing my eyes and whispering guilty prayers to baseball gods I still only-sort-of-don’t believe in.

By the time my Cardinals made it to the World Series in October of ’82, I was convinced that thing was magic. Every time I rubbed the now-worn pendant and Ozzie made the catch, or Willie knocked one over the wall, it confirmed my faith. Every time it failed, I berated myself as a heretic, unworthy of being a fan–certain that my trip to the bathroom or lapse in concentration had failed both the team and the talisman.

In every other aspect of my life, I am a cold realist, but when it comes to baseball, I believe in miracles.

A little over a week ago, I was placed on hospice care.

Now, I’m not superstitious enough to think that there’s anything that the baseball gods can do about that, but there’s part of me that can’t help but notice that both my teams, the Cardinals and the Mariners, are surging in their divisions, and wouldn’t it be something if they defied the odds and met, in the last World Series I may ever see?

Only a baseball fan could believe in such a thing.

Baseball fans know the outlandish happens every day in the season. From April through October, 30 teams play 162 games nearly every day on the calendar, and nearly none of them go by without some Hollywood moment: some rookie gets a hit in his first at-bat in front of the hometown crowd; the retiring slugger drills one over the wall on his last at bat; the no-hitter happens; the underdog wins; the dynasty continues–they all happen every single day, somewhere, in front of some amazed crowd.

That’s what makes it so easy to believe. If you watch enough of those games every year, year in and out, you’ll have seen the impossible happen, repeatedly. It makes you believe in magic.

I believe that’s what initially attracted Americans to the game: they’re both built on the magical belief that you can win it all, despite overwhelming statistical evidence that you can’t.

You can’t be a baseball fan for any length of time and not know how to lose. Good teams still lose forty percent of their games; the very best hitters fail to reach base seventy percent of the time. Many seasons your team’s win/loss ratio will hover somewhere around fifty-fifty for a period long enough to become worisome. Some years teams can lose nearly half of their games and still win the World Series. The margins are that thin.

Failure is built into the game, and if you can’t come to terms with that, you’re going to have a bad time.

Again, a lot like being American.

But is excellence possible?

Absolutely! You see it every day! A lot of talent, a lot of hard work, a little luck, and…who knows? Maybe magic can happen.

I’ve seen it happen enough that I have hope.

For the country and the game.

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by Brian E. Holbrook

The Cat’s in the Cradle

My son (who is no longer on Facebook and thus can’t be embarrassed by this anecdote) is not overly-affectionate. As a child, he was a hugger, but by adolescence, a side-armed squeeze of the shoulder was the most I could expect as the Christmas party or hospital visit wound down.

I make this observation not as a criticism, but rather as an acknowledgement that people process emotion differently. Did I miss the little boy who would climb into my lap and wrap his arms around my neck, holding me in his embrace until my heart had re-filled with love? Yes, of course. But I wouldn’t trade him for the insatiably curious, determined, good-hearted young man he has grown into.

That said, about six months ago, after my last serious hospitalization, his hugs began gripping tighter and lasting longer.
Today he came to see me for his final visit before returning to college.

We’re both determined to see one another when he returns for Christmas break at the end of this year–but planned this visit ‘just-in-case.’

He sat down next to me on the bed and wrapped his arm somewhat uneasily around my shoulder. I was so stunned by the unusual gesture that I didn’t know what to do. For a moment, two decades dropped away, and I was certain that–were I to turn and look at him–I would see the churubic face he wore as a toddler instead of the guarded but angularly handsome face that is his now.

His arm on my shoulder made me feel so warm and complete and full of love and I’d just begun to move my hand upward to grasp his when, overcome with the weirdness of it all, he withdrew his arm as I stared at my shoes, too stunned by unfamiliarity to react in a meaningful way.

We talked for a couple hours afterward. It was a good visit. He’s a good man and a good person.

But the whole time I couldn’t help but wonder what it might have been like had I managed to reach up and clasp his hand in time.

You have to act in the moments. They’re all we have.

by Brian E. Holbrook

The Langoliers

I’ve been serving my first stint in Facebook jail, so that has given me time to do some sprucing up around the blog. I updated the theme to match my house, fixed how posts were displayed, and updated the ‘About‘ page. It was an afterthought of jumbled text, and I wanted to clean it up and make it concise, but still information-rich. Ya know. For my eleven readers.

Part of what I wanted to do was link to my music on the web, but I didn’t want to belabor it, so I was going to choose a single representative site. I did a quick search of my name, trying to find the best site to link.

And it was like I’d never lived. Half-a-dozen scattered links over the first few pages of returns. My music all but erased from the digital Rolodex.

As late as last year, it wasn’t hard to find. If you had Googled ‘Brian Holbrook‘ then, the first few pages would have contained links to my albums and singles on Pandora, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, etc…

It was kind of a comfort to me. I would tell people, “At least my music will live on after I’m gone.”

But nothing lasts, really –certainly not this library of imaginary ones and zeroes.

It made me think of that old Steven King story, The Langoliers, and I imagined my digital past being ruthlessly munched into oblivion by laughable CGI.

It also got me thinking, though, that the only way to outrun the Langoliers was to stay in the present and not get trapped in the past. So, that’s what I’m going to do. It doesn’t matter what last year’s Google might have shown, it only matters what I do today.

So, I’m shifting gears a little bit here on the blog. I’m still figuring out what I want this thing to be, and what I want to accomplish with it, but expect more informal, short entries about my life, health, observations, poems, and even music. I’m still going to write the more long-form essays, but I also want to focus on a couple other things, not the least of which is more frequent, diverse, and shorter content.

More to eat, but in smaller bites, for future Langoliers.