Dear Ghost,
I sat by myself in the left field bleachers at Royal Stadium, one September night when I was considerably younger than I am now. A hard wind had blown me into Kansas City—two weeks earlier I would never have imagined myself there. Life turns on a dime, and I had wandered into a strange Missouri city, homesick but without the slightest idea of what place I missed. There seemed to be no next place.
A baseball game, because I had nowhere better to be. The crowd was like me—they had nowhere else to go on a weeknight in early autumn. The pennant race unfolded miles away; the Royals finished thirteen games back that year. The shadow of Kirk Gibson batted .236 and they had no pitching. A good crowd though, a real baseball crowd, grateful to take in a nothing game. The sports pages point elsewhere when pennant hopes are gone, and baseball stops being television and goes back to being pure and timeless.
I’ve sat alone in airports, gas stations, and bus terminals in the middle of the night—but I’ve maybe never been lonelier than sitting alone in left field that night, holding onto a bag of popcorn. I wasn’t going anywhere.
The bullpen beneath me, whistling pitches, snap of leather. Jim Eisenreich tossed a ball over the wall to a little kid a few rows in front of me, up late on a school night. People clapped because it made a nice thing for him to do—a baseball kind of thing.
Above me, clouds of moths swirled in the stadium lights. The dark felt warm, with just a tiny promise of cool underneath. In Missouri, they gaze at September skies, say winter is a hawk and they feel him coming when the wind blows. I had no jacket, but the night air still smelled of late summer.
I watched the moths, and things started to feel different and familiar. We’ve all been to the Midwest, because it’s where we start. We all belong there, ghost, at least a little bit. We know the corn fields, the odor of rich dirt, the fragrance of our earth mother. We’ve sat on a porch, watching land so flat you see truck headlights on the highway two miles off and watch the red lights disappear for a full five minutes after the diesel snoring has gone by. We’ve sipped on a glass of warm Coca-Cola before heading up to bed.
We know train whistles at night, and we love the good perfume of sheets dried on the line. It’s where we came from.
We also know baseball: hot dogs, clean white uniforms, green grass, the paint smell of bleachers in the sun—warm and eternal. Half the battle is knowing where you belong. Train stations in the middle of the night aren’t so bad when you have a ticket home.
Something came clear, sitting by myself in Royal Stadium that night in mid-September, all those years ago. I was exactly where I belonged, and everything would turn out all right. I didn’t need to know where I went next, only that I was going. I would move again, in my time. I had been holding my breath, and I let it out and watched baseball, happier than I’d been in a while.
I’m homesick for Hollywood in the summer of 1963. I miss the Santa Monica Pier, ice cream, Hershey bars, tail fins, and dark eyes. I miss your laugh. Someday, I’ll cross the years and sift Pacific sand through my fingers. I won’t have to leave, ever again—but part of me will always sit under the moth-lights in Kansas City, eating popcorn. I don’t mind. I belong there, too.
We start going home the day we’re born, ghost. I know that now. Everything is the road, everything is baseball, everything is forever, and everything is okay.
( -Dear Ghost: Fragments and Letters)
Bob Bickford
When I was little the library was my favorite place.I was born in Lone Pine, California. My parents liked to move and so did I, for a while. I have roots throughout the United States, but I was mostly raised in Toronto, Canada.
My father was a psychiatric social worker who grew up in the slums of Boston. He was a tough guy who got an education on the GI bill and pulled himself out of his birthright. He married twice, the first time to a woman who left him a widower. Alone with a toddler, I suppose he was determined that it wouldn’t happen to him again, because the second time he married a woman much younger than he was.
She was the product of a Southern family; royalty that included the same Duke family that bought a university and named it after itself. Wilful and rebellious, she scorned Southern convention, rejected the closeted skeletons and wide streak of alcoholism that hid behind decorated formality. She disowned her family, converted to Catholicism, marched for civil rights, and married the older man from a poverty-stricken background. I am the oldest of the seven children she bore, one after the next.
We were brought up in curious contrasts. There were the economies that so many mouths to feed on a middle class income made necessary; (hand-me-down clothes, Tang and powdered milk, peanut butter for ten thousand consecutive school lunches), but my mother’s background dictated private schools, music and dance and art lessons.
I attended St. Michael’s Choir School and studied piano and organ at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. I hated studying anything at all; my mother was determined that I should be a doctor and despaired over my future. I only wanted to read fiction, and did so endlessly. The library was my favorite, enchanted place (it still is). I didn’t realize I was in fact studying for what I wanted to do most.
My father’s plan to not be widowed again fell through, and my mother was suddenly gone when I was 16. He had been ill equipped to raise one child the first time, and now there were eight of them; the youngest only three years old. In some sense we lost him, too.
Life changed, just like that. My behavior guaranteed me a quick expulsion from my exclusive school. I did manage a high school diploma (by the skin of my teeth) but I was mostly happy to leave school for good. I lost an early love, and wandered to Los Angeles. I learned about the streets, and about living in the places that cause most people to lock their car doors when they drive through. I was blessed with the same genes that took my father through life in the mean part of Boston, and survived.
Eventually, I grew up and moved again, first to Atlanta and then back to Canada. I made a living in the ‘fixing cars’ arena. I live in a very old house on a wooded lot that is infested by dogs and turtles and parrots, and perhaps the ghost of a young girl. My teen-aged son is a light in my life who wants to be an author and a professional football player. I never tell him that both are nearly impossible, because they aren’t.
The library has continued to haunt me. When age said the possibility of a university degree was long past, I decided to try my hand at a novel anyway. Somehow I finished it, and have produced one a year since. I’m working on my tenth.
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The humans put the money in the money basket -- so that all contributors may become plump with their labour.