1. On Saturday, up at the Inland Lounge, before we went over to the Elks to the Bunker Hill dinner, things were slow for a while at the bar and Cas and I had a chance to talk some baseball history. Back before spring training got underway in 1965, Pittsburgh Pirate pitcher and 1960 Cy Young Award winner, Vernon Law, came to Kellogg. He gave an after school clinic at the junior high and was the featured speaker at a banquet in the evening. Cas and I were Sunnyside Elementary students and both of our fathers took us to the banquet. I don't remember what Vernon Law said in his talk, but I do remember meeting him and that he autographed a baseball I had around for years, but have lost.
Reminiscing with Cas about Vernon Law and the 1960 World Series winning Pirates inspired me to dive into the World Wide Web this morning and read more articles about the Pirates, study more historical statistics and, especially, dig more deeply into the box score of Pittsburgh's 10-9 seventh game win over the Yankees. I learned more today about first baseman Rocky Nelson. I marveled at the surprising heroics of Pirate back up catcher, Hal Smith. I beamed when I read -- and was reminded -- that the winning pitcher of that seventh game was Harvey Haddix and I wondered if this victory eased some of the sting of his having pitched twelve perfect innings the year before in a game against the Milwaukee Braves, only to lose his perfect game in the 13th inning thanks to an error by third sacker, Don Hoak.
2. Carol and Paul took a trip to Pullman and Moscow this afternoon so we didn't have a full-scale family dinner. We invited Christy and Everett over, but Everett has a painful knee and he stayed put and ate his meal at home. But, the Deke fixed a great dinner of pork tenderloin steaks, baked zucchini topped with grated Parmesan cheese, and cabbage salad. Christy had had a superb night on Saturday. She and Carol ate dinner at Anthony's in Spokane and then went to the Bing Theater for a talk given by Anne Lamott. The talk inspired both Christy and Carol and Christy told the Deke and me about what she learned and what Anne Lamott reminded her of about writing. Christy's recollections of Anne Lamott's talk were full of gratitude and excitement, not only for what Anne Lamott had to say, but for her good fortune in meeting Spokane writer, Cindy Hval.
3. The Deke and Christy had a great talk about writing and about books. I chimed in a couple of times, but mostly I listened. Christy stumped me with a question that I thought about all evening after she asked me. She wondered which of Jon Krakauer's books was my favorite. Although I couldn't answer this question, within myself I fondly remembered how much I loved introducing students at LCC to Into Thin Air and Into the Wild. I read these books during my sabbatical in the spring of 2000. I was continuing to recover from my November, 1999 bout with bacterial meningitis and came home that spring to be with Mom as she prepared for and started treatment for cancer.
Although I wasn't doing anything in the spring of 2000 as extreme as climbing Mt. Everest or heading into the wilds of Alaska to live alone, I felt like I'd returned to a precipice, tottering between life and death, a thin place I'd been to before in July of 1973 when I nearly died during an accident at the Zinc Plant and where my bout with meningitis took me again. Krakauer's vivid accounts of life on the edge in these books helped me navigate my experience and I very much enjoyed working through these books with my students and exploring the philosophical questions both books raise about humans in relation to the world of nature and the nature of reality itself when one's life is in peril.
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