SKIP IS NOWHERE to be found.
But Jane’s inside. She’s teasing. “Doin’ your homework over there?”
And she’s quick with her poem about the horsemen of the apocalypse. The bar's empty except for me and her.
“I made it for last Halloween,” she explains after the private reading. “Researched it. Wrote it on a placard, and hung it from the arch outside.”
Scripture is in the air.
I imagine people walking by on the sidewalk. Dunedin, Florida, on the day after Halloween.
Admiring Skip’s fading “Dog-Eden” wall mural (a canine-seaside world onto itself, where cats get a look in, so long as they keep to the trees).
Pondering the stern imagery of the placard poem. Wondering about Skip's for that quiet beer.
“Every Halloween I make somethin’ a little different,” Jane elaborates, “sometimes light, sometimes darker.”
Skip has Jane in charge.
While just up the road, another proprietor is present and accounted for.
Should you desire a hand-rolled cigar, a Cuban sandwich, a glass of beer or wine, or a cortadito (her coffee is to die for) . . .
. . . or just an engaging interlocutor, in Rosie —of Sabor a Cuba— you've met your match.
DUNEDIN IS ACROSS Old Tampa Bay, on the Gulf Coast of Florida.
In the 1870s, when a pair of Scots christened the place with the Gaelic rendering of their beloved Edinburgh, it wasn’t much more than a dock and store on the waterfront for passing schooners.
Non-locals may now know the town for having become the Grapefruit League headquarters of the expansion Toronto Blue Jays (of Major League Baseball) in 1977.
Not that there’s much happening at Dunedin’s magical little ballpark this year.
An impasse between negotiators for the mega-rich owners and a steadfast players’ union has taken hold, threatening not only Spring Training but also the regular season.
IN THE UNITED States and Canada, the average age for a baseball fan, today, is fifty-seven years old.
My age.
Younger people in the northerly Americas (like the younger two of my four sons) incline towards basketball and “extreme” competitions, if they bother with “sports” at all.1
Baseball fans —greying guardians of a lengthy, meticulous, slow-paced game that plays out quirkily, over long campaigns of consistency, averages and attrition— are a dying breed.
A GUY COMES in for a cold one, and I wonder if he might be Skip. No, he's come down from Philadelphia. As he’s been doing every year for a quarter century.
Formed in 1883, his Phillies have played their pre-season ball in nearby Clearwater since 1947.
His is a seasonal, sensorial yearning to be a part of it. Each Spring, Philly guy migrates for the smell of the saltwater and cut grass, “the crack of the bat,” the hollering across the diamond, the feel of that favoured wooden seat along the third-base line, warmed by the sunshine.
We spar for a moment over which of Ray Halladay’s teams “gets” truly to claim the pitching legend —this guy’s Phillies or my Blue Jays— before finding a twinned-something to agree upon.
That the lockout and delay of Spring Training is damn regrettable. And that an absence of baseball leaves more time to be troubled about other things.
“I don’t know who to blame anymore,” Philly guy remarks.
“Not for this. Or anything else.”
(Much of the world, of course, follows football [soccer], and couldn't care less about baseball.) But I wonder whether in, say, the Dominican Republic, Cuba or Venezuela, in Nicaragua, in Mexico, or in Korea and Japan — the places where USAmerican adventurism, influence, and worse saw the game untether and catch on— if the average age of the baseball aficionado, now, also skews older.
* Photographs by Kenneth Mills.
** Some names may have been changed.
*** For what Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca made of his experience in his Relación of 1542, see The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca, introduced and translated into English by Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).
For insight into the stone head in my motel parking lot, see a filmic meditation on remembrances of Cabeza de Vaca in the United States in David Fenster's short documentary Opuntia (2017).
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